GIBRALTAR: A woman sat in her car in Winston Churchill Avenue reading a paper on a summer’s evening. She was waiting to cross the border from Gibraltar into Spain, not usually a complicated procedure. Now, though, Spanish border guards were peering for minutes on end at passports and searching cars.
“I’ve been waiting for over an hour and I’ve been warned it could be another 40 minutes before I’m through,” said Luisa Alarcon, taking a break from her reading.
“It’s ridiculous. It’s meant to annoy the Gibraltarians, but it irritates Spaniards too. My husband’s going to have to give the children their dinner.”
Alarcon, who works in a supermarket in Gibraltar, is one of 7,000 Spaniards who commute every day from La Linea, a town in southern Spain, to “the Rock”, a beacon of economic dynamism in contrast to the misery over the border.
“We just want to be able to do our jobs and get on with our lives,” she said. “But the Spanish government is making that difficult.”
The latest hostilities in the 300-year conflict between Britain and Spain began with Gibraltar’s decision to create an artificial reef out of concrete blocks in an area over which Spanish fishermen like to drag their nets for clams. The ensuing row has done more than inconvenience commuters.
Three British frigates are heading towards Gibraltar in what is termed a “routine” military exercise.
This followed sabre-rattling from Madrid of the kind that has marred relations for centuries.
Under Fabian Picardo, 41, its feisty new leader, Gibraltar gave as good as it got, accusing Madrid of behaving like North Korea after it threatened to introduce a ¤50 (Dh275) border fee, restrict flights to the territory and launch tax investigations into Spanish properties owned by Gibraltarians.
The cafe terrace of the Rock Hotel offers a bird’s eye view of the Bay of Algeciras - Gibraltarians call it the Bay of Gibraltar - and of the quayside where visiting British submarines and frigates moor.
Will the long-scheduled arrival of HMS Illustrious and HMS Westminster be seized on by Spain, like the artificial reef, as a pretext for ratcheting up the conflict?
“There’s only one thing that will bring Spanish people together behind their leaders and that’s saying that ‘Gibraltar is Spanish’,” said Albert Isola, a Gibraltarian government minister, over tea on the hotel terrace. “We’re a useful political football and always have been,” he added in his cut-glass English accent.
According to this argument, the Spanish government is attempting to divert attention away from the severe economic crisis as well as embarrassing corruption scandals that have engulfed the royal family and the prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, who is defending himself against claims by his former party treasurer of having received cash payments over the years. Apparently the strategy has worked. “Gibraltar has blown the treasurer off the front pages,” Isola said.
Isola, 51, minister of financial services and gaming, hoped that the crisis would soon blow over: uncertainties over border crossings and taxes are not good for its booming economy, which has grown 30 per cent in the past four years.
The other day, Isola’s 88-year-old mother spent 5 and a half hours in her car waiting to cross the border. “Luckily, she had enough water with her as well as her knitting,” he said. “But it’s no way for us to live.”
He believed that Spain was in as much of a mess as Argentina was when Leopoldo Galterieri, the dictator, invaded the Falklands in 1982.
But nobody expects the spat over the Rock, which began when it was ceded to Britain under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, to become a Falklands-style conflict.
Since the Spanish lifted their last, full-on siege in 1783, the dispute has produced no victims but has generated plenty of hot air, notably last weekend, when Jose Garcia-Margallo, the Spanish foreign minister, announced that “play time is over”.
Imposing border delays and threatening new taxes did not seem the best way for Spain to win friends on the Rock, which it must if it aspires to lure them one day into the Iberian fold. For the time being Gibraltar seems more British than Britain with its red telephone and letter boxes, seagulls and warm beer.
Gibraltar is a British overseas territory with a British governor and an elected body that likes to call itself “Her Majesty’s government”. Many of its 30,000 residents claim a Gibraltarian ancestry going back generations and defend their right to British citizenship with the same fervour as inhabitants of the Falklands.
“We’ll always be part of Britain,” said a woman in a union flag T-shirt queuing to use the cash dispenser outside the NatWest in Main Street. “The Spanish don’t scare us.”
Further up the road, Japanese tourists were shopping in M&S and haggling over tours to visit the famous barbary apes that have run rampant on the Rock since culling was suspended several years ago.
Though the bustle of Main Street looked like business as usual, Edward Macquisten, chief executive of the local chamber of commerce, said border delays were putting off visitors and would have an impact on tourism, which accounts for a fifth of the £1.1 billion economy.
Spain appears to be shooting itself in the foot. “On the whim of a politician or two in Madrid, these controls are probably doing more damage to Spain’s local economy than to anyone else,” he said, adding that they were preventing Spaniards from getting to work and stopping Gibraltarians from spending their money in Spain.
Madrid claimed the controls were part of an effort to crack down on smugglers. Locals scoffed at the idea.
“They turn the pressure at the border on and off like a tap,” said Antonio Chamorro, a visiting Spanish engineer.
“The border guards take their orders directly from Madrid and slow things down if instructed by officials who want to make a political statement.”
Under Spain’s former Socialist government, relations with Gibraltar had been smoother: Gibraltar blossomed into a financial centre and a headquarters for internet gambling, which is estimated to account for another 20 per cent of the economy.
Peter Montegriffo, a lawyer, suggested that some Gibraltarians were nostalgic for the days when the border was sealed by General Franco, Spain’s fascist dictator, a period known as “the siege”.
People left the keys in their cars: there was no crime. Will Gibraltar be cut off again? “I hope not,” said Montegriffo. “The problem, though,” he added, “is that we’re dealing with a wounded animal”— a reference to Spain’s weak and unpredictable Rajoy.
Across the border in a small fishing port, Juan Morente and his father, also called Juan, watched as a man grilled sardines on skewers over a fire that had been made, as tradition dictates, in a boat filled with sand.
The Morentes, like their forebears, are fishermen who have spent their lives dragging nets across the glittering bay.
Now, they claim, they can no longer fish - the artificial reef would snare their nets. “It’s a good idea to make these artificial reefs in places where there are no fish,” said the younger Morente. “But the one they put over there is in a place where there are lots of fish. It doesn’t make any sense.”
However, Picardo denied that the reef was being built in an area already teaming with fish. And he defended the measure as necessary for protecting the environment.
“Despite the posturing of the past week, we have to realise that we live in the Europe of the 21st century,” he said, accusing the Spanish foreign minister of getting “carried away” and adopting an “identical discourse” to that of Franco.
Picardo called it a “David and Goliath” contest in which a country of 45m was “bullying” tiny Gibraltar. “We know how that parable ended, though,” he added.
What is the solution? Gibraltar, which in the old days controlled access to the Mediterranean, is hardly the strategic asset it used to be.
The strong naval presence, once the mainstay of the local economy, has been greatly diminished. Britain and Spain are close Nato allies. Why not let the Rock go?
Britain tried a decade ago to broker a joint-sovereignty deal but it foundered over widespread suspicions that Spain was interested in the plan only as a way of eventually recovering full sovereignty. In a 2002 referendum, 98 per cent of Gibraltarians said no.
What worries Montegriffo, the lawyer, the most is the possibility that Britain, despite all David Cameron’s protestations that sovereignty is not a subject for discussion, may one day do a deal with Madrid behind Gibraltar’s back. Surely not?
The scenario goes like this: desperate for allies in the EU to renegotiate treaties, Britain asks for Spanish help and “throws in Gibraltar” in exchange. No wonder some Gibraltarians are calling on the Queen to pay a visit.
More than the presence of frigates or submarines, that would make clear Britain’s determination never to abandon the Rock.
—Guardian News & Media Ltd.
